This invention relates to a trailer for transporting and dumping a loose, solid material such as gravel, crushed rock, asphalt, shell, sand, salt, etc.
In the building or maintenance of roadways, it is almost always necessary to transport to the roadway the solid materials used in the operations. The amount of solid materials used can be enormous, and thus, their transportation is a large contribution to the operation's costs. Transportation costs can be lowered if the transportation time can be minimized. Transportation time includes loading time, transit time to the roadway, dumping time and transit time back to the loading point.
In most operations, the transportation vehicles conventionally used are dump trucks and tractor-semitrailer rigs. To dump the solid material from these type of vehicles, the truck bed or semitrailer, as the case may be, is elevated at its forward end so that the solid material will slide to the rear and through a gate provided at the rear of the truck bed or semitrailer. The dumping rate is controlled by the extent of the elevation effected. If the solid material needs only to be dumped in a pile, the dumping can be effected quickly. However, as is usually the case in road building and maintenance, the dumping of the solid material is not into a pile but rather as a feed to a road surfacing machine, such as an asphalt or rock spreader. The spreaders are usually self-propelled and thus, the transportation vehicle must follow or lead the road surfacing machine to provide the feed. When the road surface machine requires that the feed to it be at its rear, it is necessary for the conventional dump truck or tractor-semitrailer rig to follow the road surfacing machine while traveling backward. Due to sight limitations and the difficulties of backing, the dumping time is longer than would be the case without such limitations and difficulties. Further, the dump rate must be coordinated with the feed rate required by the road surfacing machine.
It is therefore an object of this invention to provide a trailer for transporting and dumping loose, solid materials in which the dumping of the solid materials from the trailer is performed in front of the towing vehicle and is performed at an easily controlled rate.